This book defines the theory and practice of “classicism” as practiced in the 1920s by a number of composers, writers, and artists, setting it off against other movements of the period that are ...
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This book defines the theory and practice of “classicism” as practiced in the 1920s by a number of composers, writers, and artists, setting it off against other movements of the period that are customarily grouped together under the general heading of “modernism.” It argues that classicism is a more precise term than neo-classicism during this period, since every classicism from antiquity to the present shares certain common qualities as well as characteristics of its own time. The book develops terms of comparison applicable to all three aesthetic forms, exploring the theory of classicism as developed by thinkers in France, Italy, Germany, and England as a reaction, first, against the formlessness of late romanticism, and then, against the chaos of World War I. It goes on to study the manner in which that theory was practiced in the work of three exemplary figures--Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot. The model of their work is then used to determine in various test cases whether those artists can properly be called classicists. The book concludes that classicists of the ’20s aspire consciously and systematically, through the use of forms and techniques echoing the past, such as linearity and simplification, to express the qualities of reason, restraint, clarity, and order as an antidote to the disruptions of the modern world.Less

Classicism of the Twenties : Art, Music, and Literature

Theodore Ziolkowski

Published in print: 2014-12-22

This book defines the theory and practice of “classicism” as practiced in the 1920s by a number of composers, writers, and artists, setting it off against other movements of the period that are customarily grouped together under the general heading of “modernism.” It argues that classicism is a more precise term than neo-classicism during this period, since every classicism from antiquity to the present shares certain common qualities as well as characteristics of its own time. The book develops terms of comparison applicable to all three aesthetic forms, exploring the theory of classicism as developed by thinkers in France, Italy, Germany, and England as a reaction, first, against the formlessness of late romanticism, and then, against the chaos of World War I. It goes on to study the manner in which that theory was practiced in the work of three exemplary figures--Stravinsky, Picasso, and Eliot. The model of their work is then used to determine in various test cases whether those artists can properly be called classicists. The book concludes that classicists of the ’20s aspire consciously and systematically, through the use of forms and techniques echoing the past, such as linearity and simplification, to express the qualities of reason, restraint, clarity, and order as an antidote to the disruptions of the modern world.

North America is more a political and an economic invention than a place people call home. Nonetheless, the region shared by the United States and its closest neighbors, North America, is an ...
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North America is more a political and an economic invention than a place people call home. Nonetheless, the region shared by the United States and its closest neighbors, North America, is an intriguing frame for comparative American studies. This book studies patterns of contact, exchange, conflict, and disavowal among cultures that span the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. This book considers a broad range of literary, filmic, and visual texts that exemplify cultural traffic across North American borders. It investigates how our understanding of key themes, genres, and periods within U.S. cultural study is deepened, and in some cases transformed, when Canada and Mexico enter the picture. How, for example, does the work of the iconic American writer Jack Kerouac read differently when his Franco-American origins and Mexican travels are taken into account? Or how would our conception of American modernism be altered if Mexico were positioned as a center of artistic and political activity?Less

Continental Divides : Remapping the Cultures of North America

Rachel Adams

Published in print: 2009-12-01

North America is more a political and an economic invention than a place people call home. Nonetheless, the region shared by the United States and its closest neighbors, North America, is an intriguing frame for comparative American studies. This book studies patterns of contact, exchange, conflict, and disavowal among cultures that span the borders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. This book considers a broad range of literary, filmic, and visual texts that exemplify cultural traffic across North American borders. It investigates how our understanding of key themes, genres, and periods within U.S. cultural study is deepened, and in some cases transformed, when Canada and Mexico enter the picture. How, for example, does the work of the iconic American writer Jack Kerouac read differently when his Franco-American origins and Mexican travels are taken into account? Or how would our conception of American modernism be altered if Mexico were positioned as a center of artistic and political activity?

This book offers a look at the St. Lucian, Nobel-Prize-winning writer, Derek Walcott, and grounds his work firmly in the context of West Indian history. The book argues that Walcott's poems and plays ...
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This book offers a look at the St. Lucian, Nobel-Prize-winning writer, Derek Walcott, and grounds his work firmly in the context of West Indian history. The book argues that Walcott's poems and plays are bound up with an effort to re-imagine West Indian society since its emergence from colonial rule, its ill-fated attempt at political unity, and its subsequent dispersal into tiny nation-states. According to this book, Walcott's work is centrally concerned with the West Indies' imputed absence from history and lack of cohesive national identity or cultural tradition. Walcott sees this lack not as impoverishment but as an open space for creation. In his poems and plays, West Indian history becomes a realm of necessity, something to be confronted, contested, and remade through literature. What is most vexed and inspired in Walcott's work can be traced to this quixotic struggle.Less

Nobody's Nation : Reading Derek Walcott

Paul Breslin

Published in print: 2001-12-15

This book offers a look at the St. Lucian, Nobel-Prize-winning writer, Derek Walcott, and grounds his work firmly in the context of West Indian history. The book argues that Walcott's poems and plays are bound up with an effort to re-imagine West Indian society since its emergence from colonial rule, its ill-fated attempt at political unity, and its subsequent dispersal into tiny nation-states. According to this book, Walcott's work is centrally concerned with the West Indies' imputed absence from history and lack of cohesive national identity or cultural tradition. Walcott sees this lack not as impoverishment but as an open space for creation. In his poems and plays, West Indian history becomes a realm of necessity, something to be confronted, contested, and remade through literature. What is most vexed and inspired in Walcott's work can be traced to this quixotic struggle.

This book argues that after WWII American poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of matter and mind. ...
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This book argues that after WWII American poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of matter and mind. Physics led the way. This encouraged other disciplines, especially social sciences, to borrow physics concepts to form their own scientific conceptual schemes. Around mid-century, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Olson developed similarly would-be scientific models for a poetics of inquiry. The book compares their efforts, and places them in a wider context of a history of interrelations between modern American poetry and science since the modernist period. It is argued that literary theory has often lacked resources to study such epistemological competition. Physicists such as Oppenheimer and Schröger were interested in poetry, especially as an example of the difficulties of communicating quantum strangeness. During the 1950s, Rukeyser and Olson gradually abandoned the attempt to construct their own conceptual schemes using spare parts from physics. Olson adopted Whitehead’s philosophy; Rukeyser turned to narrative. By contrast, Robert Duncan embraced conceptual pluralism and continued to engage with science. Other poets found different ways to use and critique the methods of science. Later chapters give close readings of poems by Rae Armantrout, Jackson Mac Low, George Oppen and Amiri Baraka that engage with specific articles in the Scientific American. Its role in American society is explored. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the impact on poetry of the shift from physics to molecular biology as the paradigm of scientific method.Less

Physics Envy : American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After

Peter Middleton

Published in print: 2015-11-04

This book argues that after WWII American poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of matter and mind. Physics led the way. This encouraged other disciplines, especially social sciences, to borrow physics concepts to form their own scientific conceptual schemes. Around mid-century, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Olson developed similarly would-be scientific models for a poetics of inquiry. The book compares their efforts, and places them in a wider context of a history of interrelations between modern American poetry and science since the modernist period. It is argued that literary theory has often lacked resources to study such epistemological competition. Physicists such as Oppenheimer and Schröger were interested in poetry, especially as an example of the difficulties of communicating quantum strangeness. During the 1950s, Rukeyser and Olson gradually abandoned the attempt to construct their own conceptual schemes using spare parts from physics. Olson adopted Whitehead’s philosophy; Rukeyser turned to narrative. By contrast, Robert Duncan embraced conceptual pluralism and continued to engage with science. Other poets found different ways to use and critique the methods of science. Later chapters give close readings of poems by Rae Armantrout, Jackson Mac Low, George Oppen and Amiri Baraka that engage with specific articles in the Scientific American. Its role in American society is explored. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the impact on poetry of the shift from physics to molecular biology as the paradigm of scientific method.

Winner of the 2004 C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, this book offers a new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and hard ...
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Winner of the 2004 C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, this book offers a new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and hard times, the blues emerge in this study as vital responses to spectacle lynchings and the violent realities of African American life in the Jim Crow South. With interpretations of both classic songs and literary works, from the autobiographies of W. C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B. B. King to the poetry of Langston Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, the book will transform the understanding of the blues and its enduring power.Less

Seems Like Murder Here : Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition

Adam Gussow

Published in print: 2002-12-01

Winner of the 2004 C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, this book offers a new account of the blues tradition. Far from mere laments about lost loves and hard times, the blues emerge in this study as vital responses to spectacle lynchings and the violent realities of African American life in the Jim Crow South. With interpretations of both classic songs and literary works, from the autobiographies of W. C. Handy, David Honeyboy Edwards, and B. B. King to the poetry of Langston Hughes and the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, the book will transform the understanding of the blues and its enduring power.

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